Virtual wiring

There’s a nifty little program called GraphEdit that I have been using to, um, “work with” the rights management in TiVo-To-Go files. The interface allows a virtual re-wiring of the audio and video inputs and outputs for a video file. For example, if you want to compress a video you would grab the output “lead” from the video and wire it to the input of a box in the chart representing whatever compression you liked. This interaction modality achieves in a single view the ideal of being both intuitive (out connects to in, and on and on) and completely explicit (the flow that you manipulate represents exactly what the program is doing). As a bonus it is also kinda fun. The bastard child of Storyspace and Media Cleaner.

I employed an interface like this for a piece of software I wrote in graduate school, but the links I allowed between video files implied sequence in time not transformation of one node by another. This distinction highlights a unique opportunity. What if you could link two video files to a single output file, creating a merger of the two? The links themselves could function as the transform filters — overlay, embed, distort, etc. Now that would be interesting!

I once played with a program that did visual transforms of images using a spreadsheet interface. You placed files into cells and then put together formulas — essentially filters, as in Photoshop — between the cells. The resultant file in a new cell was your output, just like spreadsheets work. (Anybody know what this program was called?)

Mr. Romer’s answer is to do with this moment what Burning Man does every summer: Stake out the street grid; separate public from private space; and leave room for what’s to come. Then let the free market take over."

Cross-posted at Medium. Years ago, when I was just moving into the world of urban technology, I stumbled upon the urban “walkshop” format developed by Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim (refined and expanded by Mayo Nissen). These walking tours were collaborative, lightly-structured investigations of surveillance and communications machinery sprinkled throughout various cities. Though these walkshops […]

Cross-posted at Medium. CityFi partners John Tolva and Story Bellows frequently find themselves on the frontier of urban change. Their facilitation of major projects often convenes public-private stakeholders, utilizes new models of technology and innovation, and drives policy development, all with the goal of making our cities more livable, vibrant and economically competitive. Currently, this […]